Victor Navasky's Naming Names

Elia Kazan and The Case for Silence

A story is told that in 1955, after Arthur Miller had finished A
View
from the Bridge, his one-act play about a Sicilian waterfront
worker who
in a jealous rage informs on his illegal immigrant nephew, Miller
sent a
copy to Elia Kazan, who had directed his prize-winning smash
Broadway
hits All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949),
but had
broken
with him over the issue of naming
names before HUAC. "I have read your
play and would be honored to direct it," Kazan is supposed to
have wired
back. "You don't understand," Miller replied, "I didn't send it
to you
because I wanted you to direct it. I sent it to you because I
wanted you
to know what I think of stool pigeons."

Apocryphal? Perhaps. But the story had credibility and currency
because
after Kazan's April 1952 testimony before HUAC, Miller and Kazan,
once
the closest of collaborators and the best of friends, no longer
spoke.
Kazan was not asked to direct Miller's next play,
The Crucible
(1953),
and as Sam Zolotow delicately reported, "It is known that a
disagreement--nothing to do with the play, though--exists between
them
that would make their further association incompatible." They
had
planned to collaborate on a movie about the waterfront to be
called "The
Hook," but now Kazan went on to do his own waterfront picture, On
the
Waterfront, in which Terry Malloy comes to maturity when he
realizes his
obligation to fink on his fellow hoods. And Miller wrote View,
which
tried simultaneously to understand and condemn the informer,
Kazan
emerged in the folklore of the left as the quintessential
informer, and
Miller was hailed as the risk-taking conscience of the times.
"One could
almost say," said Richard Rovere, "that Miller's sense of himself
is the
principle that holds informing to be the ultimate in human
wickedness."
Arthur Miller

If we are to understand why so many otherwise high-minded people
agreed
to lend themselves to HUAC's degradation ceremonies, Kazan is a
good
place to begin. Not because he is typical--he was too successful,
articulate, self-aware, and visible to be that--but because in
his life,
his politics, and his art he has done as much to defend the
naming of
names as his old colleague Miller has done to challenge it.

"If Kazan had refused to cooperate [with HUAC]," speculates one
director-victim of the day, "he couldn't have derailed the
Committee, but
he might well have broken the blacklist. He was too important to
be
ignored." Probably no single individual could have broken the
blacklist
in April 1952, and yet no person was in a better strategic
position to
try than Kazan, by virtue of his prestige and economic
invulnerability,
to mount a symbolic campaign against it, and by this example
inspire
hundreds of fence sitters to come over to the opposition.

Even Kazan's harshest critics conceded he had earned his success
and
power through talent and effort. Born in 1909 in Istanbul,
Turkey, to the
Kazanjoglouses, a family of Anatolian Greeks who emigrated to the
United
States when he was four years old, Kazan worked his way through
Williams
College and Yale Drama School as a waiter. "I think the reason
why I
later joined the Communist Party and turned against everybody was
born at
Williams. I had this antagonism to privilege, to good looks, to
Americans, to Wasps."

An alumnus of the already legendary Group Theatre of the 1930s,
in the
late 1940s Kazan along with Lee Strasberg had helped to found the
Actors
Studio, which gave America the Stanislavski-based "method" and
such
outsize talents as Marlon Brando, Julie Harris, Lee J. Cobb,
Montgomery
Clift, Shelley Winters, and James Dean. Besides Miller's plays,
Kazan
directed such classics as Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth
and
Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire His burgeoning
career as a
screen director was marked by the successes of A Tree Grows in
Brooklyn
(1945), the controversial Gentleman's Agreement (1948), the
documentary-style Boomerang (1947), and the poetically powerful
screen
version of Streetcar (1951). From 1946 on he had de facto
first-refusal
rights on any Broadway-bound play. And since the blacklist never
dominated the New York theater as it did Hollywood, the
conventional
wisdom was that he wouldn't have, in the vernacular of the day,
to sing
for his supper.

Kazan had a hard-won reputation for caring about the social
content of
his work. As an actor in the Group Theatre he was the taxi driver
in
Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty who held up his fist at the
end and
yelled "Strike!" as the audience yelled "Strike!" right back, in
unison.
As a member of the proletarian theater movement, he had
coauthored a play
with Art Smith (on whom he was later to inform) called Dimitrof;
subtitled "A Play of Mass Pressure." It told how the pressure of the
world
proletariat forced the release of the Bulgarian Communist
Dimitroff after
he gave a stirring courtroom speech and refused to confess
falsely to the
setting of the Reichstag fire. The villain of the play was the
informer
Van der Lubbe, who had been persuaded by Hitler and Goring to put
the
finger on Dimitroff. The hero of the play, the authors explained
in an
introductory note, is "mass pressure."

On Broadway, the plays Kazan directed dealt with problems of
conscience,
responsibility, and personal honor in a materialistic society,
and even
in Hollywood he traded in such socially significant themes as
anti-Semitism (Gentleman's Agreement), racial discrimination
(Pinky
[1949]), and revolution (Viva Zapata [1952]).

It was because Kazan seemed to take the social content of his art
so
seriously that his appearance before HUAC caused such astonished
dismay
among many of his friends and colleagues. He was in rehearsal in
Boston
on Flight into Egypt, George Tabori's play about a group of
refugees from
Austria awaiting passage to America, when he was first subpoenaed
by HUAC
and the rumors started to fly. He went to Washington for a
hearing in
executive session on a day when he and Tabori had been scheduled
to
observe the waiting room of a local hospital (on the theory that
since
much of the action of the play took place in a waiting room,
maybe they
would pick up some usable business). On his return, Kazan asked
Tabori
what he had seen, and the playwright, who felt that Kazan's own
confusion
about his HUAC appearance was distorting his perspective on the
play and
its theme of betrayal, was said to have replied, "They cut a
man's tongue
out."

The late Kermit Bloomgarden, who had produced Death of a
Salesman,
told me, "I do remember that any number of times in the course of
the
investigations Kazan would say he had been [in the Communist
Party], he
was not now, he wanted no part of the Communists, but if they
wanted him
to give names, he'd tell them where to get off. He told me that
as late
as six weeks before he testified.

"I had an office at 1545 Broadway on the first floor. Kazan had
one on
the fourth floor. My office had a window then. He waved to me
through the
window to come down and have a drink with him at Dinty Moore's.
He told
me he'd been to Washington and met with J. Edgar Hoover and
Spyros
Skouras and they wanted him to give names and he was going to
call the
people whom he had to name. Gadg [Kazan's nickname] wanted to
know what I
thought, and I said, 'Everyone must do what his conscience tells
him to
do.' He said, 'I've got to think of my kids.' And I said, 'This
too shall
pass, and then you'll be an informer in the eyes of your kids,
think of
that.' Finally we left Dinty Moore's and we walked down the block
and he
went his way and I went mine and we didn't see or speak to each
other for
fifteen years. I immediately called Miller and I said to Arthur
that it
was ninty-nine percent sure that Gadg was giving names. Miller
went over
to see Gadg and Molly [Kazan's wife], and then he and Gadg walked
for
hours through the woods in Roxbury, Connecticut, where Miller
told him he
would regret it for the rest of his life and tried to talk him
out of
what he was going to do. When he couldn't, Gadg went to
Washington and
Miller went right up to Salem and wrote The Crucible."

Kazan appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee
twice,
the first time in January 1952, when he answered all questions
except the
one about what people he knew to be members of the Communist
Party
between the summer of 1934, when he joined it, and the spring of
1936,
when he left. In April he told the Committee he had come to the
conclusion "that I did wrong to withhold these names before,
because
secrecy serves the Communists, and is exactly what they want."
Now his
testimony, written in advance, was articulate, tough, and
detailed as he
named eight members of his Group Theatre unit and some Party
functionaries. He split with the Party, he said, over its attempt
to use
him to take over the group:

... I was instructed by the Communist unit to demand that the
group be
run "democratically." This was a characteristic Communist tactic;
they
were not interested in democracy; they wanted control. They had
no chance
of controlling the directors, but they thought that if authority
went to
the actors, they would have a chance to dominate through the
usual tricks
of behind-the-scenes caucuses, block voting, and confusion of
issues.
This was the specific issue on which I quit the Party. I had
enough
regimentation, enough of being told what to think and say and do,
enough
of their habitual violation of the daily practices of democracy
to which
I was accustomed. The last straw came when I was invited to go
through a
typical Communist scene of crawling and apologizing and admitting
the
error of my ways....
I had had a taste of police-state living and I did not like it.

Had he
simply told his story and named his names along with the scores
of other
witnesses, he might have been denounced on the left, celebrated
on the
right, and his testimony forgotten. But Kazan was not content to
let his
affidavit speak for itself. First, he appended to his testimony
an
annotated bibliography cum apologia which listed and "explained"
the
entire history of his twenty-five professional forays as a
director. This
seemed to his critics unnecessary bending. Most of the items on
his list
were comparatively harmless, and Kazan said so, but whenever
there was
the possibility of an interpretation at odds with prevailing
dogma, he
anticipated the objection. Thus:

Boomerang (picture), 1946: Based on an incident in the
life of
Homer Cummings, later Attorney General of the United States. It
tells how
an initial miscarriage of justice was righted by the persistence
and
integrity of a young district attorney, who risked his career to
save an
innocent man. This shows the exact opposite of the Communist
libels on
America.

All My Sons, by Arthur Miller, 1947: The story of a war
veteran who
came home to discover that his father, a small manufacturer, had
shipped
defective plane parts to the Armed Forces during the war. Some
people
have searched for hidden propaganda in this one, but I believe it
to be a
deeply moral investigation of problems of conscience and
responsibility.

Gentleman's Agreement (picture): Picture version of the
best-selling
novel about anti-Semitism. It won an Academy Award and I think it
is in a
healthy American tradition, for it shows Americans exploring a
problem
and tackling a solution. Again it is opposite to the picture
which
Communists present of Americans....

Pinky (picture), 1949: The story of a Negro girl who
passed for
white in the North and returns to the South to encounter freshly
the
impact of prejudice. Almost everyone liked this except the
Communists, who
attracked it virulently. It was extremely successful throughout
the
country, as much so in the South as elsewhere....

Viva Zapata (picture, my most recent one), 1951: This is
an
anti-Communist picture. Please see my article on political
aspects of
this picture in the Saturday Review of April 5, which I forwarded
to your
investigator, Mr. Nixon.

The day after his testimony was given (in executive session), it
was
released, and the day after that (April 12, 1952) Kazan took an
ad in The
New York Times explaining his position and exhorting others to do
likewise. Its logic--that the way to fight totalitarian secrecy
was with
free-world openness--seemed impeccable, if one accepted its
premise (that
all Communists were totalitarian conspirators), its asides (that
the
employment of liberals was threatened "because they had allowed
themselves to be associated with Communists," rather than because
some
freelance vigilantes had joined with HUAC to create and enforce
a
blacklist), and its rhetoric (Communist censorship is "thought
control"
but HUAC intimidation is unmentioned). It will be
recalled--although
Kazan didn't mention it in the ad--that part of the reason he
left the
Party was because they wanted him to confess error and humiliate
himself.
Here is the ad:

A STATEMENT, by Elia Kazan

In the past weeks intolerable rumors about my political position
have
been circulating in New York and Hollywood. I want to make my
stand
clear:

I believe that Communist activities confront the people of this
country
with an unprecedented and exceptionally tough problem. That is,
how to
protect ourselves from a dangerous and alien conspiracy and still
keep
the free, open, healthy way of life that gives us self-respect.

I believe that the American people can solve this problem wisely
only if
they have the facts about Communism. All the facts.
Now, I believe that any American who is in possession of such
facts has
the obligation to make them known, either to the public or to the
appropriate Government agency.

Whatever hysteria exists--and there is some, particularly in
Hollywood--is inflamed by mystery, suspicion and secrecy. Hard
and exact
facts will cool it.

The facts I have are sixteen years out of date, but they supply a
small
piece of background to the graver picture of Communism today.
I have placed these facts before the House Committee on
Un-American
Activities without reserve and I now place them before the public
and
before my coworkers in motion pictures and in the theatre.
Seventeen and a half years ago I was a twenty-four-year-old stage
manager
and bit actor, making $40 a week, when I worked.

At that time nearly all of us felt menaced by two things: the
depression
and the ever growing power of Hitler. The streets were full of
unemployed
and shaken men. I was taken in by the Hard Times version of what
might be
called the Communists' advertising or recruiting technique. They
claimed
to have a cure for depressions and a cure for Naziism and
Fascism.

I joined the Communist Party late in the summer of 1934. I got out
a year
and a half later.
I have no spy stories to tell, because I saw no spies. Nor did I
understand, at that time, any opposition between American and
Russian
national interest. It was not even clear to me in 1936 that the
American
Communist Party was abjectly taking its orders from the Kremlin.

What I learned was the minimum that anyone must learn who puts
his head
into the noose of party "discipline." The Communists
automatically
violated the daily practices of democracy to which I was
accustomed. They
attempted to control thought and to suppress personal opinion.
They tried
to dictate personal conduct. They habitually distorted and
disregarded
and violated the truth. All this was crudely opposite to their
claims of
"democracy" and "the scientific approach."

To be a member of the Communist Party is to have a taste of the
police
state. It is a diluted taste but it is bitter and unforgettable.
It is
diluted because you can walk out.

I got out in the spring of 1936.

The question will be asked why I did not tell this story sooner.
I was
held back, primarily, by concern for the reputations and
employment of
people who may, like myself, have left the Party many years ago.

I was also held back by a piece of specious reasoning which has
silenced
many liberals. It goes like this: "You may hate the Communists,
but you
must not attack them or expose them, because if you do you are
attacking
the right to hold unpopular opinions and you are joining the
people who
attack civil liberties."

I have thought soberly about this. It is, simply, a lie.

Secrecy serves the Communists. At the other pole, it serves those
who are
interested in silencing liberal voices. The employment of a lot
of good
liberals is threatened because they have allowed themselves to
become
associated with or silenced by the Communists.

Liberals must speak out.

I think it is useful that certain of us had this kind of
experience with
the Communists, for if we had not we should not know them so
well. Today,
when all the world fears war and they scream peace, we know how
much
their professions are worth. We know tomorrow they will have a
new
slogan.

Firsthand experience of dictatorship and thought control left me
with an
abiding hatred of these. It left me with an abiding hatred of
Communist
philosophy and methods and the conviction that these must be
resisted
always.
It also left me with the passionate conviction that we must never
let the
Communists get away with the pretense that they stand for the
very things
which they kill in their own countries.

I am talking about free speech, a free press, the rights of
property, the
rights of labor, racial equality and, above all, individual
rights. I
value these things. I take them seriously. I value peace, too,
when it is
not bought at the price of fundamental decencies.
I believe these things must be fought for wherever they are not
fully
honored and protected whenever they are threatened.

The motion pictures I have made and the plays I have chosen to
direct
represent my convictions.

I expect to continue to make the same kinds of pictures and to
direct the
same kinds of plays.

Kazan's status, testimony, apologetic curriculum vitae, and
advertisement, and rumors that he could make a big-money deal
with Spyros
Skouras contingent on his naming names--these collectively
established
him on the left as the ultimate betrayer, even as he was hailed
on the
right as patriot and applauded by centrist liberals for doing the
difflcult but right wing. He went on the letterhead of the
American
Committee for Cultural Freedom (which condemned Miller for being
insufflciently vocal in his condemnations of Soviet
totalitarianism), and
his first post-HUAC film, Man on a Tightrope (1953), had an
overtly
anti-Communist theme. The Daily Worker, picking up on Kazan's
having
named his old Dimitroff co-author, Art Smith, asked with
characteristic
rhetorical overkill: "Isn't it clear that Kazan, like Vander
Lubbe, is
repeating the same old vicious lies the Nazis invented to cover
up their
murderous aggression! And for a similar purpose--to aid Wall
Street's
drive to world power?"

The Worker went on to observe that in Scene One of Dimitroff,
Hitler puts
his arms around Vander Lubbe and says, "This is the greatest
moment of my
life." Said the Worker: "Kazan's belly-crawling statement calling
upon
U.S. intellectuals to prostrate themselves before the Big Money
sounds as
if he too really believes (one can visualize the chairman of the
Un-American Activities Committee putting his arm around him),
'This is
the greatest moment of my life.'
"It is the lowest moment of Kazan's life, one which will haunt
him
forever."

It soon became clear that whatever Kazan's motives, his
reputation as the
epitome of a betrayer would outlast the Party's ritualistic
indignation.

When HUAC asked the folksinger Tony Kraber, another Group Theatre
alumnus
who had been named by Kazan, whether they had known each other in
the
Party, Kraber responded, "Is this the Kazan that signed the
contract for
five hundred thousand dollars the day after he gave names to this
Committee?" To the day he died in 1977, Zero Mostel, who made it
back to
a stardom he had never known before he was blacklisted, referred
to Kazan
as "Looselips." Sidney Zion, the editor of Scanlan's Monthly, a
brash
magazine that flourished briefly in the 1970s, once ran an
article called
"Hello, Informer," and to accompany it, he republished Kazan's
1952 ad
and sent him a check for $150. No matter how unrelated the
occasion, few
serious interviewers fail to ask Kazan about his informing.

Today, Kazan declines to discuss his twenty-odd-year-old decision
to name
names. He has, he tells me--in person and by mail--received
dozens of
requests for interviews on this subject, but with one partial
exception
he has turned them all down. He gives a number of reasons, some
personal,
some general, depending on who is doing the asking. It is, he
says, not
all that important. If he had the same decision to make again, he
might
decide the same way. In any event, he is now busy with other
things--writing novels and traveling--and that's what he would
prefer to
talk about. He will "do that scene" in his own way in his own
good time,
and he doesn't intend to undercut his future eflfort to write
about the
1950s. Another thing: the decision to name names was a difflcult
decision, and a difflcult decision brings pain no matter which
way one
goes. "The liberals who think I did it for the money are
simplistic. I've
turned down million-dollar deals." Besides, he would prefer to
describe
his position outside the "envelope" of someone else's words.
After all,
he was there, and he is a novelist, and to capture the
complexities
requires a novelist's ability to recreate context. He has been
reading
over his voluminous papers (which he donated to Wesleyan
University,
under terms that render them unavailable to the public until he
has
finished using them for his own purposes), and he finds them
unique and
personal and full of unexpected turns. The trick is not to attack
others,
but to try to understand some of the painful events in a context
where
personalities and past experiences and pressures interlock, and
who is
better qualified than he? The materials, after all, include
intimate
diaries, including his own notes following sessions with his
therapist,
letters from and to such varied personalities as Miller, Marilyn
Monroe,
Tennessee Williams, et al. It is all so intimate that he
"wouldn't show
it to my own brother."

The partial exception is Michel Ciment, the French critic who
regards
Kazan as one of the great film directors of all time and who was
granted
permission to ask Kazan whatever he wanted, provided Kazan had
final
editing privileges on the taped interview. Although they
discussed the
subject only briefly, what he told Ciment in 1971 was not
inconsistent
with his more generalized comments when ostensibly refusing to
discuss
the matter with others, a cross between ambivalence and
justification:

I don't think there's anything in my life toward which I have more
ambivalence, because, obviously, there's something disgusting
about
giving other people's names. On the other hand . . . at that time
I was
convinced that the Soviet empire was monolithic.... I also felt
that
their behavior over Korea was aggressive and essentially
imperialistic.... Since then, I've had two feelings. One feeling
is that
what I did was repulsive, and the opposite feeling, when I see
what the
Soviet Union has done to its writers, and their death camps, and
the Nazi
pact and the Polish and Czech repression.... It revived in me the
feeling
I had at that time, that it was essentially a symbolic act, not a
personal act. I also have to admit and I've never denied, that
there was
a personal element in it, which is that I was angry, humiliated,
and
disturbed--furious, I guess--at the way they booted me out of the
Party.... There was no doubt that there was a vast organization
which was
making fools of the liberals in Hollywood.... It was disgusting
to me
what many of them did, crawling in front of the Party. Albert
Maltz
published something in few Masses, I think, that revolted me: he
was made
to get on his hands and knees and beg forgiveness for things he'd
written
and things he'd felt. I felt that essentially I had a choice
between two
evils, but one thing I could not see was (by not saying anything)
to
continue to be a part of the secret maneuvering and
behind the scenes
planning that was the Communist Party as I knew it. I've often,
since
then, felt on a personal level that it's a shame that I named
people,
although they were all known, it's not as if I were turning them
over to
the police; everybody knew who they were, it was obvious and
clear. It
was a token act to me, and expressed what I thought at the
time....

I don't say that what I did was entirely a good thing. What's
called "a
difficult decision" is a difficult decision because either way
you go
there are penalties,tright? What makes some things difficult in
life is
if you're marrying one woman you're not marrying another woman.
If you go
one course you're not going another course. But I would rather do
what I
did than crawl in front of a ritualistic Left and lie the way
those other
comrades did, and betray my own soul. I didn't betray it.

If Kazan had fully refrained from discussing the issue of informing, that
would indeed be unfortunate, since he has so much to tell us. Happily for
students of the phenomenon, however, Kazan has been talking about
informing for twenty-five years, although he has frequently put out his
message in disguised form. Indeed, it can be argued that his film On
the Waterfront, with its screenplay by Budd Schulberg (who also named
names), makes the definitive case for the HUAC informer or at least
is--among its considerable other achievements--a valiant attempt to
complicate the public perception of the issue. The image of the informer
is transformed from thirties-McLaglen to fifties-Brando.

After he
unwittingly sets up young Joey Doyle to be pushed off the roof, the hero,
Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) reflects, "He wasn't a bad kid, that Joey,"
but he is quickly reminded, "He was a canary," which by the waterfront
ethic is supposed to justify the brutal murder.

The movie is rife with
talk of "rats," "stoolies," "cheesies," "canaries." Terry Malloy has to
choose between the waterfront ethic, which holds ratting to be the
greatest evil, and the Christian ethic, which suggests that one ought to
speak truth to power. The former is represented by the vulgar, vicious,
cigar-chomping corrupt labor boss, Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb, also a
real-life informer), and the latter by the cleancut, gutsy,
straight-talking priest, Father Barry (Karl Malden). Terry comes to
maturity and wins the girl (Eva Marie Saint) when he gains the courage to
inform. In addition he achieves heroic stature as he single-handedly takes
on the mob at the risk of his life and in the process comes to true
self-knowledge. "I been ratting on myself all these years," he tells
Johnny Friendly, "and I didn't know it. I'm glad what I done."

A
particularly poignant moment occurs when Terry's protege, Tommy, who has
helped him tend Joey Doyle's pigeons on the roof, confronts him after he
has turned informer and throws a dead bird at his feet. "What's that for?"
asks Terry. "A pigeon for a pigeon," says Tommy. Even here, however, the
message is clear: The injunction against informing is all right as a
guideline for an adolescent street gang like Tommy's Golden Warriors, but
it won't do for adults who are obliged to look at each situation in its
own moral context. (What's ratting for them is telling the truth for you.)
Squealing is relative.

Whatever else it may be, Waterfront seems an allegory for 1950s
anti-Communism, with the Waterfront Crime Commission an analog for HUAC.
The critic Peter Biskind [in the book Seeing is Believing] has gone
further, ingeniously elaborating a religious metaphor. According to
Biskind, when Terry decides to become a stool pigeon he fuses the
spiritual and secular realms:

In Christian terms, Terry
voluntarily assumes the role of the meek (the dove); in secular terms he
assumes the role of the stool pigeon (the informer); and the one
transfigures the other. The political informer as Christian saint. Terry
is well on his way to crucifixion before he testifies. He puts his hand
through a plate-glass window (stigmata) and later when his friends avoid
him after his testimony he experiences the abandonment of Christ on the
Cross.

But one needn't accept either the cold war or
religious analogies to recognize the fact of Kazan-Schulberg's
achievement: the creation of a context in which the naming of names is the
only honorable thing to do--the maximum case for informing.

Kazan says
life is ambiguous and his movies are meant to avoid black-and-white
portrayals. "The librals' answer to HUAC is simplistic. That's what I
think is wrong with Arthur's plays," he says, "and you know how I like
him. But he's always striving for an absolute, a single answer. That's
what I object to about Lillian [Hellman]. I respect her work but she's an
either-or person." Yet Kazan-Schulberg leave no room for ambiguity in
Waterfront. The most memorable moment in the picture is the taxicab
scene where Terry tells his brother Johnny (Rod Steiger) that Johnny
should have taken better care of him ("I couldda been a contender"). If
his informing had meant that the loyal and loving Terry would be sending
his brother to prison or perhaps the electric chair, then the dilemma
posed by the act of informing would have been real. But Kazan-Schulberg
have the mob rub Johnny out, thereby giving Terry a socially sanctified
personal motive (revenge) for testifying against the mob, as well as the
political one (anti-corruption): This denies the audience any opportunity
for genuine consideration of the ambivalent and dangerous complexities of
the informer issue. "Squealing" may be relative, but in Waterfront
it is mandatory.

Waterfront is not Kazan's only indirect
reference to his HUAC experiences. In novels, films, and interviews he
frequently includes material that justifies informing. After writing his
number-one best-seller, The Arrangement, which was published in
1967 by Stein & Day (whose co-founder is the same Sol Stein who was
formerly executive director of the American Committee for Cultural
Freedom), and making it into a movie, Kazan let it be known that he was
forsaking moviemaking, which had lost its magic for him, for full-time
novel-writing. But two best-sellers later, he returned to the screen with
a quite powerful low-budget movie he filmed at his country home in
Connecticut, and which he directed at the request of his son Christopher,
who had written it. The Visitors (1972) is the story of a gentle
Vietnam vet who informed on two Calley-type buddies whom he had witnessed
raping a Vietnamese girl in a My Lai situation. The film tells what
happens when the brutal men he testified against are released from the
stockade and journey up to Connecticut to terrorize him and his
girlfriend.

In a number of conversations with me, the ostensible
purpose of which were to (1) get to know each other but (2) explain why he
wouldn't talk about his naming of names, the subject of informing kept
coming up spontaneously. John Dean was appearing before the Senate
Watergate Committee, in its televised hearings, as we talked one time, and
Kazan observed that Dean's mouth seemed to move apart from the rest of his
face; neither of us was unaware that Dean was an informer who might be
said to be engaged in socially constructive betrayal. Kazan mentioned a
jury on which he had served that was about to acquit a guilty man because
the only evidence against him was provided by a police informant, until
Kazan and the critic Alfred Kazin, who was also on the jury, intervened
and carried the day. He lent me the transcript of a trial involving a
Jewish Defense League police informer who was being persecuted by the
police. And when we ran into each other on a Broadway bus a few days after
Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago was published, Kazan observed,
"Isn't it interesting that all of that was going on while all of what
you're looking at was going on?" The implication: If he was right about
Stalinist brutality, perhaps he was not altogether wrong to name the names
of those who denied Stalinist brutality.

Even if Kazan had really
found it possible to resist the temptation to revisit the scene of his
alleged crime, his historical connection with Arthur Miller probably of
itself guarantees that for him there is no escaping the issue. For Miller,
preoccupied as he is with the relationships between public and private
morality, between the claims of the state and the claims of conscience,
has returned again and again to the theme of betrayal, and each journey
serves to remind those who care of Kazan's counterpoint role.

Miller's
The Crucible, set in Salem during the witchcraft trials of the
1600s, tells the story of a community in the grip of terror. Its central
character is John Proctor, who prefers to die rather than to give false
testimony. When the prosecutor Danforth asks John Proctor to name names,
he says:

I speak my own sins; I cannot judge another. I have
no tongue for it.... I have three children--how may I teach them to walk
like men in the world, and I sold my friends?

DANFORTH: You have not
sold your friends--

PROCTOR: Beguile me not! I blacken all of them
when this [a false confession he has prepared] is nailed to the church the
very day they hang for silence!--

Miller had written the
play from documents he uncovered in research, and it was his conviction
that "the fact that Proctor and others refused to give false evidence
probably helped to bring the witch trials to an end. Their character was
such that it penetrated the mob. When it came time for Rebecca Church to
be hanged, the mob surged in and had to be stopped by cavalry.

The
critic Eric Bentley and others attacked the implicit analogy in the play
between Massachusetts and Washington on the grounds that there hadn't
actually been any witches in Salem, whereas there were Communists in
Washington. As Miller recalls it, "The Crucible appeared to some as a
misreading of the problem at best--a 'naivete,' or at worst a specious and
even sinister attempt to whitewash the guilt of the Communists with the
noble heroism of those in 1692 who had rather be hung than confess to
nonexistent crimes.... The truth is," Miller argues, "the playwriting part
of me was drawn to what I felt was a tragic process underlying the
political manifestation.... When irrational terror takes to itself the
fiat of moral goodness somebody has to die. I thought that in terms of
this process the witch-hunts had something to say to the anti-Communist
hysteria. No man lives who has not got a panic button and when it is
pressed by the clean white hand of moral duty, a certain murderous train
is set in motion."

Miller might have added that there was another sense in which his
allegory was appropriate. The word "Communist" had come, as we
have
seen, to signify an amalgam of traitorous espionage-agent and
conspiratorial, violent revolutionary, yet Kazan and the other
entertainment community witnesses called before HUAC were not,
and never
had been, either of these. In that sense HUAC was hunting in
Hollywood
for something that wasn't there.

To the charge that his play was agitprop against the McCarthy
witchhunt,
Miller, like Kazan, had a complicated answer:

It is not any more an attempt to cure witch hunts than Salesman
is a plea
for the improvement of conditions for traveling men, All My
Sons
a plea
for better inspection of airplane parts.... The Crucible is,
internally,
Salesman's blood brother. It is examining ... the conflict
between a
man's raw deeds and his conception of himself; the question of
whether
conscience is in fact an organic part of the human being, and
what
happens when it is handed over not merely to the state or the
mores of
the time but to one's friend or wife."

Even as Miller argues that critics have misread the symbolic
meaning of
The Crucible, Kazan has suggested that it is wrong to read
On the
Waterfront primarily as an allegory in defense of his behavior
before
HUAC. "It was aimed at something more universal," he told two
interviewers in 1971. He cited the Mafia trials and the My Lai
investigations as examples of situations where good people are
conflicted between the social duty to expose and the ethic of silence.
"That's a very characteristic and very genuine inner conflict of man.
As a matter of fact," says Kazan, "On the Waterfront did not
start with
Budd Schulberg, it started with Arthur Miller." And he tells the
story of how, long before he knew Schulberg, long before his HUAC
testimony, he went to Arthur Miller and said, "Let's do a story about
the waterfront!"
They actually got as far as Miller's drafting the screenplay of
The
Hook," which was scheduled to be made by Columbia Pictures. "Then
I got a
phone call from Art," says Kazan, "saying that he had decided he
didn't want to do it. I still don't know why he did that."' (The
reason,
according to Miller, is that Harry Cohn, Roy Brewer, and the FBI
all suggested that Miller should substitute reds for racketeers as
the force
terrorizing the waterfront workers. When Miller said no, Cohn
fired off
a telegram to him which said, "Strange how the minute we want to
make a
script proAmerican, Miller pulls out.")

Miller did not get around to his own waterfront drama until 1955;
A View
from the Bridge is the story of Eddie Carbone, an Italian
immigrant who
lives on the waterfront with his wife Beatrice and his niece
Catherine,
for whom he has an irresistible attraction. When a Sicilian
cousin,
Rodolpho, who has entered the country illegally, wins Catherine's
love,
Eddie, consumed with incestuous jealousy, informs on Rodolpho to
the
immigration authorities, and soon thereafter suffers the fatal
consequences of his betrayal.

Whatever Miller's intention (he later told me, "We don't want to
forget
the enemy--it wasn't the informer. It was the state which forced
people
to inform"), the anti-informer theme is inescapable. The
injunction
against informing is underlined at the outset as Eddie explains
to his
family why it is best that they tell nobody about the illegals:

EDDIE: I don't care what the question is.
You--don't--know--nothin'. They
got stool pigeons all over this neighborhood they're payin' them
every
week for information, and you don't know who they are. It could
be your
best friend. You hear? To Beatrice: Like Vinny Bolzano,
remember
Vinny?

BEATRICE: Oh yeah. God forbid.

EDDIE: Tell her about Vinny. To Catherine: You think I'm blowin'
steam
here? To Beatrice: Go ahead, tell her. To Catherine: You
was a baby then.
There was a family lived next door to her mother, he was about
sixteen--

BEATRICE: No, he was not more than fourteen, cause I was to his
confirmation in Saint Agnes. But the family had an uncle that
they were
hidin' in the house, and he snitched to the Immigration.

CATHERINE: The kid snitched?

EDDIE: On his own uncle!

CATHERINE: What, was he crazy?

EDDIE: He was crazy after, I tell you that, boy.

BEATRICE: Oh, it was terrible. He had five brothers and the old
father.
And they grabbed him in the kitchen and pulled him down the
stairs--three
flights his head was bouncin' like a coconut. And they spit on
him in the
street, his own father and his brothers. The whole neighborhood
was cryin'.

CATHERINE: Ts! So what happened to him?

BEATRICE: I think he went away. To Eddie: I never seen him again,
did you?

EDDIE: . . . Him? You'll never see him no more, a guy do a thing
like that. How's he gonna show his face? To Catherine: Just remember
kid, you
can quicker get back a million dollars that was stole than a word
that you gave away.

In an effort to reconcile an impulse he doesn't understand, Eddie
forgets
what happened to Vinny and why. He consults the lawyer-narrator
Alfieri,
a sort of Greek-chorus character. And when Alfieri understands
what is on Eddie's mind he says:

I'm not only telling you now, I'm warning you....
You won't have a friend in the world, Eddie! Even those who
understand
will turn against you, even the ones who feel the same will
despise you.
Put it out of your mind! Eddie!'

Eddie is powerless to resist. And by his act of informing he
betrays not
only Rodolpho but the people he loves most. He has no place to
go, as the
people who knew him and accepted him--the neighborhood--reject
him. And
so he dies.

By the time Miller was called to appear before HUAC on June 21,
l956, he
had already found his way onto a number of blacklists, including
that of
the New York Board of Education, which canceled a contract with
him to write a film on street gangs. His performance before the
Committee almost
lived up to his art.

Like Proctor, Miller was willing to talk about himself--and he
did, at
considerable length--but not to name others. Thus, asked why the
Communist Party produced his play You're Next, he remarked, "I
take no
more responsibility for who plays my plays than General Motors
can take
for who rides in their Chevrolets." He also told the Committee,
apropos
his brief flirtation with organized Communism, that "I have had
to go to
hell to meet the devil" (which led Lillian Hellman to quip that
he must
have gone as a tourist). But when asked whether he had attended a
Communist Party meeting at the home of one Sue Warren, which was
chaired by Arnaud d'Usseau, author of the play Deep Are the
Roots (directed, as it
happens, by Kazan), he declined to answer. Unlike most resisting
witnesses, however, he did not invoke the Fifth Amendment's
protection
against self-incrimination. Instead, he invoked the First
Amendment's guarantee of free speech and, by implication, the right to
silence.
Whereas the straight Fifth would, under prevailing doctrine, have
definitely kept Miller out of jail, "taking the First" risked
incurring
the fate of the Hollywood Ten. Under these circumstances, many
people on the liberal left perceived him as something of a heroic
countersymbol to
the prevailing informer-as-hero type. But the reality was
somewhat more
ambiguous than that, since Miller conceded the Committee's right
to inquire into his own political opinions, which is more than many
resisters wanted to grant; also, by 1956 the worst ravages of the
anti-Communist terror seemed to have passed, and Miller after all
had at
his side his fiancee, the nation's reigning sex queen, Marilyn
Monroe: The reason he wanted a passport in the first place (the
ostensible
subject of the hearings) was to take her to London, where they
planned to
honeymoon and see one of his plays. Finally, although if
convicted he was
subject to a maximum sentence of $1000 and a year in prison, he
was so polite that Chairman Walter thanked him for his testimony,
leading some to believe he might never be cited for contempt; in the
event, he was
fined $500 and given a suspended thirty-day sentence.

In arguing on appeal from his contempt of Congress citation,
Miller's
attorney, Joseph Rauh, was able to ask a unique rhetorical
question:
"What could have a more restraining effect on a man's future
writing than forcing him publicly to perform an act openly condemned
by his current
writing?" At the very moment the Committee was interrogating
Miller, A View from the Bridge was being performed in various
parts of this country
and was being readied for production in England.

It was not only those who agreed with him who saw Miller as the
archetypal anti-informer. The liberal Richard Rovere found that
what Miller did before the Committee involved "a certain amount of
moral and political confusion." Even if Miller was morally justified
in refusing to
bow to the Committee's procedure of testing the good faith of
witnesses
by demanding that they name names, Rovere thought, he was wrong
in trying
to elevate the refusal to inform into a "universal principle."
Otherwise,
wrote Rovere, we should supplement the Fifth Amendment with
another one
saying, "No man could be required to incriminate another," and if
we did
that, the whole machinery of law enforcement would collapse
because, "If
any agency of the community is authorized to undertake a serious
investigation of any of our common problems, then the identities
of others' names are of great importance."'

But Rovere attributed to Miller a position he never took. Miller
the
witness was articulating a point of conscience, not a legislative
program. Miller the playwright never pretended to take his
characters
beyond their context. Moreover, although Miller may have been the
informer's most visible symbolic enemy, his own attitudes on the
matter
were in flux. Marilyn Monroe, who had worked with Kazan at the
Actors
Studio and had an affection for him, got the two exfriends back
on
speaking terms. Miller revised A View from the Bridge, so that
it
was
less a condemnation of Eddie Carbone-as-informer and more a
legend of
the human condition. In the final version the lawyer Alfieri
makes a new
speech that gives Eddie a dignity he originally lacked:

Most of the time now we settle for half and I like it better. But
the
truth is holy, and even as I know how wrong he was, and his death
useless, I tremble for I confess that something perversely pure
calls to
me from his memory not purely good, but himself purely, for he
allowed himself to be wholly known and for that I think I will love
him more than
all my sensible clients. And yet, it is better to settle for
half, it
must be! And so I mourn him--I admit it--with a certain...alarm.

In 1963, when Miller and Kazan--who had separately dreamed of
working
with a national repertory theater--were invited to serve as
resident
playwright and director, respectively, of Lincoln Center for its
first
season (1963-64), the reconciliation between these two was hard
for many
to understand, much less accept. This was especially true since
the play
on which they were to renew their collaboration was Miller's
autobiographical After the Fall, which had as its protagonist
Quentin
(Jason Robards), a one-time Communist who breaks with a friend
about to
turn informer before a congressional committee. At the time most
of the
gossip focused on blond, beautiful, vulnerable Maggie, modeled,
it
seemed, on the late Marilyn Monroe, but the insiders knew that
Kazan was
also directing an informer-character based on Kazan. The New York
Times
critic wrote at the time, the play recalls "those who would name
names
and those who wouldn't.... After the Fall seeks to understand,
not to judge."

One member of the company recalls: "I couldn't believe what was
going on.
Gadg in his own really paranoid way thought he was the hero of
this
play--not that he ever asked Arthur. He thought it was about him,
not
Marilyn. He and Jason had a big battle about that long
naming-names
speech. That's when Jason vanished--went off on a week's binge
and they
couldn't find him. It was a bitter, dark, and terrifying fight
they had
over that speech.
"At first Miller thought Kazan understood his play--then he
thought Kazan
used Barbara Loden (Maggie) to take it away from the central
issue. I
mean, he looked at things sexually instead of intellectually--he
made her
play it in a see-through dress--and that was a road to escape.
"The problem with Arthur is that he was an 'informer.' He was
informing.
Gadg kind of had one over him because he was really 'naming'
Marilyn and
the rest of them. The invasion of privacy is what made it so
sick."

Miller never accepted the criticism that he had invaded Marilyn
Monroe's
privacy. The critic Tom Prideaux probably had it right when he
wrote,
"For many years, whoever sees After the Fall will be haunted by
Marilyn's
golden image. It comes with the territory....Miller points out
that those
who were vicious to her alive were most quick to condemn the
alleged
portrayal of her dead. "The hypocrisy which bewildered and
finally
enraged her in life indeed seems to be following her in death."

Many of Miller's friends never forgave him for reuniting with
Kazan. "The
irony of Kazan doing After the Fall," notes Norman Rosten, a
friend of Miller and Monroe, 'was that Miller thought he was getting
the same man
who directed Death of a Salesman, and Kazan was not the same
man. It was
not the same setup. Miller was looking for a replay of his past
triumphs
and the plays were different, the times were different.
Kazan--because of
what he had gone through--was not the same man and the chemistry
was different."

Kermit Bloomgarden, too, blamed Miller for the play and its
director. "He
gave the Kazan-character a flag of honesty and then he attacked
the
people who took the Fifth Amendment."

Even Miller's close friend and publicist on all his plays, James
Proctor,
stopped talking to him for two years. He remembers the day in
1958 he was
to appear before the Un-American Activities Committee: "At
seven-thirty
in the morning my doorbell rang and it was Arthur. He was there
to bolster my morale." Now Proctor was bafffled as to why Miller,
who had
never waivered on what he himself would do, would allow Kazan to
direct his play. (But then, Proctor had what some might characterize
as a bias.
He had been named by Kazan--specifically, Kazan had told HUAC
that Proctor had signed Molly Kazan's name as a sponsor of the Waldorf
Peace
Conference--the 1949 popular-front gathering attacked for its
Communist participants--without her permission, and that he had later
apologized for this.) Proctor is a moralist who says, "I've always
believed that why
a subject behaved as he did was a proper subject for medical
study, but
how he behaved was a proper basis for judging a person."

"It was a time when everybody became an expert on everybody
else's life,"
says Conrad Bromberg, the son of the actor J. Edward Bromberg,
who was
named by Kazan and appeared before HUAC under compulsion and
against
doctor's orders. He declined to cooperate and died shortly after.
Conrad
(who has written and rewritten a dozen drafts of a play called
"The Death
of a Blacklisted Actor," the titular character being based on a
combination of his father, John Garfield, and Edward G. Robinson)
observes, "There was a great Brownie point system set up,
depending on
which way you wanted to jump. Who was more cowardly? Who was more
courageous? Lee Strasberg [director at the Group Theatre and
Actors
Studio] was a big adviser on what to do. His position was that
artists
have no place in politics, and if you get caught you get out.
Everybody
was meeting in living rooms and everywhere the same argument
occurred. On
the basis of what do you take that position? It was not so much a
defense
of the USSR as a question of how far do you bend in order to
survive? If
it doesn't bother you, you bend all the way, with the knowledge
that it
will affect others. For two years my father ducked subpoenas.
But that
didn't matter. Anything this side of giving names and addresses
of your
best friends was okay. Whether you talk to them or lie to them or
evade
them didn't matter.

"You were constantly in the position of asking, Who am I in
relation to
other people? Do I trust my impulses, my humanity, my own sense
of
living, or do I follow others? Is it al matter of power? Arthur
Miller
made a decision, in spite of an awful lot of advice the other
way. People
said, 'You are blowing your career.' Either he was braver or
smarter than
they were or he could not be in the company of corrupt men for
too long
and live well with himself. There's a kind of healthy arrogance
that many
creative people have. They don't want to be bothered with
hustlers. And
you certainly don't want your life controlled by them. Would you
want to
be a prisoner of Victor Riesel, who could tell you to appear at a
certain
meeting? That's what it came down to--that you belong to somebody
else
who was not even your peer."

Conrad thinks "Kazan made a very pragmatic decision. He takes the
offensive whenever possible. Clifford [Odets] named names out of
ego--he
never liked to be made to look like a schmuck. and something like
taking
the Fifth Amendment smelled, and I don't think he liked that. But
Gadg
knew that nobody opposed the Committee and came out with a whole
career.
You knew that up front. And he wasn't about to be destroyed.
Business was
involved, too. Twentieth Century-Fox had pictures in the can
directed by
Kazan. In a sense he had leverage. He also had a contract for
several
hundreds of thousands of dollars. So if he did a number for them
they had
to do a number for him.

"I've seen Gadg since.... I ought to be angry at him but I'm not.
The
obligation fights the reality. When I see him, I keep thinking
he's a
figure out of my childhood."

Conrad Bromberg is a man who has come to terms with personal
ambiguities. Others see his father, Joe Bromberg, as victim,
perhaps
martyr, and Kazan as victimizer. These nagging I.D.'s won't go
away. When
in 1972 Kazan appeared on WNBC Television's hour-long interview
show
Speaking Freely, to discuss with Edwin Newman among other
things
his latest novel, The Assassins (which has an
informer-character in
it), two-thirds of the way through the following exchange took place:

NEWMAN: Some of [the Group Theatre's actors] got into political
difficulty in Hollywood which is a subject that I really cannot
avoid. In
1952--and this is, I suppose one of the things for which you were
most
criticized--you appeared before the House Committee on
Un-American
Activities and confessed that you had been briefly for eighteen
months a
Communist when you were young. And you named I think it was seven
other
people who had been Communists. A good many people thought you
shouldn't
have named any other names whatever you said about yourself. You
have
never over the years said much about that. Is there anything you
want to
say about it?

KAZAN: Well, not really, in the brief context of a program like
this, Ed,
because I'm going to write about it. I think when it is
understood from
the point of 1972 it is one thing and when it is understood in
the
context of what was going on in 1952 and how we felt in 1952 [it
is
another]. Also then I think there is something disgusting about
naming
things, naming names and all that, that I felt ambivalent about.
But on
the other hand, when we knew about what Khrushchev reported in
his book, we had close contact with it. We knew about a society that
the left was
idealizing then, the Russian society. We knew that it was a slave
society. We had a good idea how many people were being killed.
I've often
wondered how some of the people who criticized me went through
those
years and stayed behind Russia, . . . continued to idealize it
when they
knew what was happening.... I've felt sad about it or bad about
it, and
I've sometimes felt--well, I would do the same thing over
again.... To
talk about regrets, I do have some and I don't have some. I think
I spoke
up not for any reason of money or security or anything else, but
because
I actually felt it. If I made a mistake, then that was a mistake
that was
honestly made.... It was a part of a thing that has to be
understood in
terms of that time. Now, when I look back on it, you know
hurnanly I feel
some regrets, and as a symbolic gesture I don't. I feei that I
didn't
tell a lie, I didn't tell any falsehoods, I didn't speculate, I
didn't do
a lot of the things that I would feel dishonorable about. And as
I say,
to write about it, to speak about it, very briefly and simply, I
think is
not what I want to do. I'd rather in my own time, in my own way
speak
about it at length."

One evening in 1978 I was driving home from the country and the
radio
talk-show host Barry Gray announced that his next guest would be
Elia
Kazan, who as it happened was plugging his latest novel, An Act
of Love.
Before the program was over Gray asked Kazan about his HUAC
experience,
and inevitably the listening audience was duly informed that that
was in
the past, that nobody, especially Kazan, was really interested in
it anymore, that it wasn't worth talking about, that the subject was
in any event too complicated to cover in two minutes on the air but
that he was
writing a book about it where he would tell his side, and so
forth.

There is method to Kazan's reticence. It's a strategic silence,
as much
mystification as anything else. There is about it the strong hint
that
were he at liberty or inclined to tell all, had he but the time
to say
his say or get it on paper, the painful nobility of his action
would at
last be appreciated. But don't get him wrong, it was a tough
decision
either way and he is as ambivalent today as he was then.

At the time, Kazan urged all former comrades to follow his
example and
fight totalitarian secrecy with "the facts." Now he prefers to
keep his
counsel, to take, as it were, a retrospective Fifth.

It says something that those like Miller and the Hollywood Ten,
who
claimed their right to silence then, now miss no opportunity to
tell
their tale, whereas many, like Kazan, who talked at the time,
citing the
compulsion of history, today invoke their preference for silence.

Kazan has written, "My favorite quote is from Jean Renoir:
'Everyone has
his reasons.'" And yet for his own reasons he hasn't fully
shared his
reasons. His thesis--that in certain contexts to inform can be an
act of
honor, and that therefore it is simplistic to condemn all
informers--sounds reasonable. But it begs the question of whether
his own
"token" betrayal occurred in such a context.

His silence, however, has resonance. Without giving a single
American
interview on the subject, he has sent the message that the
decision he
made was a painful but honest one, that given the same context he
might
do the same thing again, that the Communists rather than the
informers
were the betrayers, that he injured no one by his conduct, that
perhaps
Kazan really believed what he said, that he will tell his story
in time,
and that the whole thing is not really all that important, not
worth
talking about.

In fact, it is so "unimportant" that he refuses to talk about it.
Yet
each of Kazan's hints are themes that anticipate or echo more
elaborate
justifications advanced by other informers more willing or able
to share
their experience, to explain and try to understand out loud why
they did
what they did, to subject their "reasons why" to the tests of
conversation, consideration, logic, analysis.